


a third lifetime to get it right

by buckstiel



Category: Campaign: Skyjacks (Podcast)
Genre: Other, Spoilers through Ep10, Surprise Kissing, Wreck Dref 2x19
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-09
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-10-24 21:26:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17711864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: Travis goes to annoy Gable on the flight back to Wolfstooth and reaps more than he bargained for.





	a third lifetime to get it right

**Author's Note:**

> inspired by the thread and art that came about when i tweeted "the dref/gable agenda," which made me feel incredibly powerful. so thank you. 
> 
> anyway. this is super unbeta'd. i finished something (and in one sitting!) and i'm hashtag proud.

With each passing decade in Travis Matagot’s long, long life, another crop of life experiences fell into the grayscale of the mundane—his favorite meal from childhood indulged one too many times, the view of Spéir from the deck of an airship an unremarkable backdrop. The wine they managed to pilfer still sat warm in his belly as well as the sting of a good battle, but there wasn’t much else. Not anymore.

So it wasn’t so much that he enjoyed finding new ways to grate on Gable’s nerves, but it was the closest thing he could find that rivaled the swoop in his stomach when the featherweave sails first pulled him away from the earth, his eyes wide and his hair not yet silver. Annoying Gable was like shoving your hand into the sea— _dangerous_.

Or so it felt that way. Any religion he had left had fallen away when he passed the mark of what should have been his first lifetime, but there was something about them that made him think back to his mother, hazy, hole-pocked memories of her kneeling at the foot of her bed.

The _Uhuru_ wasn’t slated to reach Wolfstooth until later that afternoon, and Travis was bored. He was bored, and he overheard Wilson mention to Spit that Dref and Gable were having a closed meeting with the captain before landfall, and suddenly he wasn’t bored anymore.

He had a purpose, and he burst in the captain’s quarters with all the might of one.

Gable bit at the inside of their cheek to keep from swearing. “Have you heard of knocking? What if it wasn’t you or Jonnit?”

“Well, good thing it _was_ me,” he sighed. Orimar was seated at his desk, so Travis hopped up on the desk itself and offered him a wink, which was quickly returned. “What’s going on? What’s…” He’d been so intent on bothering Gable that he’d only just noticed that Dref had his coat and shirt stripped off. “Was I interrupting something?”

“I—uh, I’m…” Dref stammered. “Anyway, uh—Gable, the point i-i-is that—powerful m-m-m-m-magic scars don’t h-have to, um, stay that way. That is—um, they c-can heal with the r-r-right use of other necrotic...” He trailed off, vaguely gesturing to his own chest where two angry red lines sat on the edge of a rib pushing out of his gaunt figure.

“I’ll consider it,” Gable said curtly. “I doubt—I’ll consider it.”

A curious pair, those two. Mysteries. Nothing more interesting over the endless span of years than something new and inexplicable. A smirk crept onto Travis face as he watched Dref start backing up towards his clothes. “What are you doing?” Travis said. “What’s the rush?”

“I—“

“Relax, it’s fine. Though—Gable…Gable, Gable, Gable, I need to talk to you. Make a confession, really,” he sighed, hopping up from the desk. He took his time, pausing at some of the shelves of trinkets and books to hold them up to the light or run a finger down a spine. “The guilt is simply weighing on me, and I need absolution.”

Gable’s eyes narrowed in the slightest of glares, suspicion rolling of their body and seemingly fluffing up the loose strands of their hair in an otherworldly wind. “I suppose so,” they said finally. “What did you do?”

“So. You know how we had to run by that one island up north chasing that shipment of gunpowder? And that we stayed overnight?” He waited for them to nod, and maybe he waited a bit too long. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dref’s thin frame, still shirtless, sink into Orimar’s leather chair in the corner. It squeaked when he sat and then every other time he moved—and he was nothing if not a squirmer.

“It was my bird season there,” he said. “You know, the sun sets, the goopening comes upon me and all that. But I’d lost track of time—Daisy and Fuentes had started up a card game, and no one was lifting my ban _anytime_ soon, and so I’d ended up down in the lower decks. You know—“

“I know many things, Travis. Where is this going?”

“—by your birds.” He paused, reveling in their lowering squint. “See, it had been so long since we’d been somewhere I could even _be_ a bird, much less go through any part of the night in the company of your delightful flock. So—there I was, a bird, and I discovered that I could understand their twittering!”

He couldn’t, of course. Or: he was fairly certain he couldn’t, though he’d never had the opportunity to test the theory while the _Uhuru_ was docked. Though if he wasn’t sure, there was no way Gable or Dref would know, and that was all that mattered.

“You…can?” Gable’s face softened, but only slightly. And even then, Travis couldn’t be sure that he wasn’t seeing things; their face sometimes just did that all on its own.

“Oh, _yes_. Lucas has an incredibly sharp wit that he loves deploying against Metatron, the humorless grump.”

There was a careful timing to all of this, a template that he could fine-tune on a moment’s notice given the right cue, and this cue was saying _milk it_. They silently contemplated the scenario he concocted, and it must have made sense to them on some level because a hint of an actual smile made its way to their face, and for a moment Travis felt guilty about what he’d set out to do.

Almost. There’d be more times to ask for forgiveness anyway.

“We chatted for hours, Gable, _hours_ —built up quite the rapport, see…and, well.” He sighed, ran a hand through his hair so it would flop down across his forehead in the perfectly messy way he’d spent the last seventy years mastering. “All of the birds and I had a frank conversation about certain gray areas once it seemed we were headed that way and—Gable, I bussed all of your birds.”

In the time it took him to blink, it felt like all of the air was sucked from the room. Gable’s eyes darkened in that unnatural way, their hand twitching at their side for something—a sword perhaps—that wasn’t there. From the corner, Dref could only manage a dry squeak.

“I think, technically, a few of them bussed _me_.” He couldn’t stop himself. Shadows pooled in Gable’s glare and they only pushed him further down into this pit he’d dug for himself. Even the chaotic fight on the _Civility_ couldn’t get his old blood pumping like this. “I immediately felt bad— _immediately_. And I couldn’t harbor the guilt any longer, try as I did.”

Now was the time to let them simmer, boil up to a breaking point until they burst onto the deck and let the gossip weave the event into something much more interesting than it ever had been. He wouldn’t have to say another word.

But he could. He could say something else, and then they’d all be in uncharted territory—and there was nothing more dangerous than uncharted territory.

“I need to be punished…” The pause lingered, waiting, until it seemed to overpower him. “…daddy.”

It all happened at once—Dref squeaked louder, barely catching it in his hand as it flew to his mouth, and Gable’s eyes flashed black, but just a flash, retreating into a something more familiar, a fed-up glare the crew saw twice a day. It was sharper now behind closed doors and the close proximity they shared simply knowing about Orimar. So perhaps it wasn’t as familiar as Travis wanted it to be.

“Oh…ohoho,” Gable said, and their voice was started to take on that otherworldly tenor that dug into the very marrow of his bones. “And punish you I will—“

“W-Wait!”

Gable had managed to grab a fistful of Travis’ shirt before Dref’s outburst. They both turned to him—he was halfway out of the leather chair, flushed bright crimson across his cheeks and nose and all the way down to his stomach, his own eyes an angry-Gable dark in their own way with the pupils blown wide.

“Wait,” he said again. He took another calming breath, but it sounded too ragged to have done any good.

They waited, and still Dref said nothing. The waiting, at least, let Gable’s fury ebb until they could speak without rattling the very fabric of reality. “What are we waiting for?” they said. “Are…” They glanced at Travis, and then cocked an eyebrow at Dref. “You like this, don’t you?”

“I—I um, that’s n-n-not—“

“I think he likes it.” Gable was staring at him now, fist still bunched up in the collar of his shirt, only the danger he’d sensed before had been replaced by something much more urgent and inscrutable and _overwhelming_.

Travis risked a glance back at Dref: still squirming, still pulling at his trousers trying to hide evidence he didn’t have to give, and as much fun as it was to bother Gable, perhaps Dref was a more satisfying target after all.

“You know…” Travis sighed, taking his own fistful of Gable’s collar. “I think he does.”

He pushed up on his tip-toes to pull Gable into a kiss—at the back of his mind, he wondered if he’d possibly misinterpreted what they’d meant, but then two large hands hoisted him up by his ass. He was fine. He was more than fine, actually, because Gable had licked into his mouth and whatever was coming out of Dref’s mouth climbed up in pitch until it would have required Travis’ wolf form to hear.

By seas, Gable could kiss well—a surprising notion, given his suspicions and what he’d been told about such things, and on some level he knew it was just to dig under Dref’s skin, to wind him up and let him skitter off into a blaze of fireworks. On some level he knew this, but on another level, he could have lived the next twenty years with Gable holding him like this.

Not even kissing him. Their body pressed so close offered a kind of calm he couldn’t consciously recall. It was something that ran deeper, earlier.

They didn’t appear flustered as they broke away, which was fine. It was fine. Travis dropped back to the ground and strode toward where Dref still sat, frozen but sweating buckets. His large eyes gaped even wider from behind his glasses, and everything about him made Travis want to reach out. Touch. Dref’s body had so many new, odd angles that Travis hardly knew what to do with himself—he ran a finger along his cheekbone before leaning in, straddling him against the back of the leather chair.

“It’s all right,” Travis said. “I’m flattered.” He winked, and again Orimar’s squelching wink followed.

“O-oh…” Dref shook as he dragged his gaze over Travis, finally letting his hand reach toward his pec.

It wasn’t anything impressive and never had been, but Dref acted he’d just discovered the lost treasure of the Bandit Queen, lost and incoherent, and it was all so much. Too many years had passed since anyone looked at him like this, and even then, Travis wondered if anyone back then had even approached this level of reverence.

If he even deserved it.

But he couldn’t think about that now.

“There’s nothing to worry about,” he whispered close in Dref’s ear, and just as Gable made their way behind the chair.

They leaned into his other ear, running a hand through his short cropped hair, and through his high, desperate whining, they caught Travis’ eye. There would be hell to pay later for managing to lie—they wordlessly implied as much. But as their grip slid further down Dref’s chest, coming to rest on his hips, something else laid behind their eyes, just beyond the point of understanding.

_You’re all meddling in matters you cannot comprehend_ —that was as much as he could make out.

If only Gable knew that was only an invitation.


End file.
